Posen speech revisited - I'm a native speaker

[CercaTrova]

Hello everyone,

I'm still somewhat unsure about the holocaust question after about a week of 24/7 research. Let me say upfront that I am impartial in the debate and only interested in finding the truth, whatever it may be. I am at this point quite certain that at the very least, the holocaust could not possibly have happened quite the way we have been told. Zundel, Cole, Irving, Leuchter, Rudolf et al. demonstrate that quite clearly.

However, I came across the Posen speech today, which made me wonder again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yi9hT8ES2g

I have looked at the four threads about this topic that are in the archives of the CODOH forums, and it seems the main points revisionists use to refute the validity of this recording are:

1. "The recording is a fake, if this was really a secret meeting then why would they have recorded it?"

-> This argument seems plausible to me, but it is not proof. Has there been any analysis of this audio by an impartial party such as David Cole for example? I'm asking about an impartial analysis because some revisionists seem similarly fanatic as the exterminationists, in that they seem more interested in proving that the holocaust did not happen than they seem to be impartially interested in getting to the objective truth of the matter. What is required is a nonpartisan analysis of this recording.

I think it's important to remember that there are also recordings of Hitler where he mentions the "Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa". Vernichtung definitely means extermination, not uprooting. This is a threat Hitler issued in 1939, in order to avert the allies from engaging in war with Germany, even though Hitler does not specify that the Jews will be exterminated by Germany. He only says that the extermination would be the result of a war. In other places he mentions that a second world war would cause a rise of antisemitism in every nation that got dragged into the war, so we might interpret that both ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWx7nq_lnQM

2. "the German word 'ausrotten' means to uproot, not to exterminate"

This is false in the context of current-day German. "Ausrotten" definitely means (to) exterminate, "entwurzeln" would be the word for (to) uproot. That raises the question whether the German language could have evolved enough in the past 70 years to explain this difference in interpretation. I have my doubts for two reasons.

2a. I researched the etymology of the word "ausrotten", and it was indeed commonly used in the context of "uproot", but only in the context of plants, not in the context of people or peoples. In that latter context it has always meant (to) exterminate. Even for the former context, I was only able to find citations from the 17th century, nothing as recent as WWII. Click here for source.

2b. Himmler (if it is in fact him, and if the speech is in fact in its original unedited state) uses two other words to describe the treatment of the Jewish people: "ausschalten" und "umbringen". Ausschalten is somewhat ambiguous, but is also commonly associated with killing. Umbringen is unambiguous and always means (to) murder.

Quote from the speech:

Wir haben das moralische Recht, wir hatten die Pflicht unserem Volk gegenüber das zu tun, dieses Volk, das uns umbringen wollte, umzubringen.

Translation: We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us.

This sounds to me like Himmler definitely wanted the Jewish people to be completely exterminated, even though he saw this as an act of self defense in light of his view that the Jews were responsible for Germany's annihilation (WW1) and subsequent enslavement (Versailles) and furthermore responsible to the Bolshevik threat to Germany.

I'm especially puzzled why revisionists only debate the meaning of the word "ausrotten", when the word "umbringen" is also part of this speech - a word that unambiguously means (to) murder.

Unless, of course, the recording is either a fake (recorded by a voice actor) or has been meddled with (edited to make it sound like there was an extermination plan when in fact there wasn't and Himmler was speaking of something else).

Your thoughts, gentlemen?

CercaTrova

[onetruth]

CercaTrova

How will you interpret this words from the speech :

"Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. "

~

[Lineman]

There's no doubt the Nazis used extremist language. But so did others:

Churchill had favoured a strategy of attacking the civilian population centres from the air some 20 years before Hitler ordered such raids.

Britain's war leader is quoted during the First World War as saying: "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population."

[Hannover]

This "speech" has been shredded repeatedly. Some points:

- No human remains to back up the unfounded claims. Not a single enormous mass grave as alleged has ever been excavated, contents verified and shown. Not one. The storyline says 6M Jews & 5M others = 11M, now just think about that.
How bizarre, claims of mass murder where there is no evidence to support it. The gas chambers are scientifically impossible as alleged and have been debunked ad nauseum by Revisionists, and the alleged 1,000,000 - 2,000,000 supposed mass shootings of thousands at a time in claimed known sites have produced no mass graves at those sites. Why is that?

- In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of 'ausrottung' would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler's handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, 'judenevakuierung', or evacuation of the Jews, not 'extermination'.

Then we have some True Believers citing much later dictionaries claiming ausrotten as meaning 'extermination' (uprooting is it's real meaning) ... published in accordance with the propaganda about WWII. There's problems with that though:

- Here's something from a 1935 speech by Rudolf Hess:

National Socialist legislation has now introduced corrective measures against this over-alienization. I say corrective, because the proof that the Jews are not being ruthlessly rooted out [AUSGEROTTET] is that in Prussia alone 33,500 Jews are working in manufacturing and industry, and 89, 800 are engaged in trade and commerce; and that with only 1 per cent of the population Jewish, 17.5 per cent of our attorneys and in Berlin nearly half the registered doctors are still Jewish.

Ofcourse at this time (1935), the charge against the Nazis was not that they were ruthlessly exterminating the Jews.

- The 1936 anti-German book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled DER GELBE FLECK: DIE AUSROTTUNG VON 500,000 DEUTSCHEN JUDEN.
I guess the absurd 'exterminations' started in 1936 then.

- Hitler in his Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1933:

den Marxismus und seine Begleiterscheinungen aus Deutschland AUSZUROTTEN" - "to eradicate Marxism and its accompanying phenomena from Germany

.
How does one explain "from Germany", "out of Germany" if the "auszurotten" only possible meaning was the physical extermination of living beings? Was Hitler thinking of gassing "Marxism" itself? If so, no gassings of German Marxists has been alleged before the war.

- It should also be pointed out that if Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews was a secret plan that required the destruction of evidence at the end of the war, then why did he use the word ausrotten in so many of his public speeches prior to the war?'
Either way, the meaning of 'ausrotten' actually plays against the holocaust theory. If it did mean murder and the plan was public, then that means the Germans did not attempt to carry out a secret plan and did not attempt to destroy the evidence afterwards to conceal the plan. Clearly this has major implications reaching far beyond the meaning of one of Himmler's "secret" speeches. If the meaning of the word is figurative, then Himmler's speech is not proof of anything.

This alleged (recorded) speech, as German judge Staeglich has adroitly pointed out, is a hodgepodge of non-sequitors, nonsense, and re-worked text, see:
'Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence
By Wilhelm Stäglich'
http://codoh.com/library/document/230

- There are missing pages, retyped pages by different hands, even pages ahve been re-numbered..

- Then we have a so called "secret" speech in front of thousands. Frankly the assertions about it are laughable.

- Yivo (Yiddish Scientific Institute) of New York was very active in the Rosenberg Ministry to process documents for submittal to the Nuremberg trials.

- Members of the audience like SS-OGruF Gottlob Berger denied that Himmler was talking about the extermination of the Jews at all. I suggest reading: NMT, vol 13. p. 457-487

- To have a speech with such alleged secret content recorded? Right. SS General Berger did not recognize Himmler’s voice listening to the tape.

- the complete lack of orders for the desperate assumptions made about it

onetruth asks:

How will you interpret this words from the speech :

"Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. "

I suggest a history lesson for onetruth concerning the genocidal terror bombing campaign waged by the "Allies" against innocent German civilians which the Allies still try to conceal, where the shattered remains were piled up like cord wood by the thousands, tens of thousands.

more here:
'Posen speech'
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=372
and here:
http://codoh.com/library/document/891/
' Heinrich Himmler's Posen Speech from 04.10.1943
By Heinrich Himmler
Published: 1943-10-04
Given at Posen 4 October 1943
Translation of Document No. 1919-PS, Nuremberg Trial
by Carlos Porter'

Hannover

The 'holocaust' storyline is one of the most easily debunked narratives ever contrived. That is why those who question it are arrested and persecuted. That is why violent, racist, & privileged Jewish supremacists demand censorship. What sort of truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth? Truth needs no protection from scrutiny.

The tide is turning.

[hermod]

I think it's important to remember that there are also recordings of Hitler where he mentions the "Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa". Vernichtung definitely means extermination, not uprooting. This is a threat Hitler issued in 1939, in order to avert the allies from engaging in war with Germany, even though Hitler does not specify that the Jews will be exterminated by Germany. He only says that the extermination would be the result of a war. In other places he mentions that a second world war would cause a rise of antisemitism in every nation that got dragged into the war, so we might interpret that both ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWx7nq_lnQM

The implementation of Hitler's famous annihilation prophecy was definitely a task for Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment - having "conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years" within Germany (as Hitler put it in that speech) - and for similar ministries accross Europe, not for a Gasmeister or another as exterminationists claim. Hitler was only talking about bringing Jewry's power to nothing on a continental scale in the event of another world war, just as what had been done and achieved in the new Reich from 1933 to 1938. This is what his Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa (annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe) was about.

'Hitler's Public [alleged] Holo-words & Dishonest Historians'
viewtopic.php?t=9038

And Hitler didn't mention "that a second world war would cause a rise of antisemitism in every nation that got dragged into the war" IN OTHER PLACES. The spread of anti-Semitism was the way the annihilation of Jewry was supposed to be achieved. Hitler was not a scared sheep terrorized by the ADL with 'anti-Semite' name-callings. When Hitler said 'anti-Semitism', he was not talking about [alleged] hateful feelings toward Jews like today. When he said 'anti-Semitism', he was talking about opposing Jewry's power through anti-Jewish laws and propaganda/education. Hitler's understanding of the word 'anti-Semitism' was closer to Wilhelm Marr's one than to ours. In Hitler's views, Jewry's power was to be annihilated in every country dragged into the war because he believed such countries would have finally enacted laws and spread propaganda both making the Jewish grip over media, politics and economics impossible.

[EtienneSC]

2a. I researched the etymology of the word "ausrotten", and it was indeed commonly used in the context of "uproot", but only in the context of plants, not in the context of people or peoples. In that latter context it has always meant (to) exterminate. Even for the former context, I was only able to find citations from the 17th century, nothing as recent as WWII.

The terms 'ausrotten' and 'vernichtung' are both used repeatedly in Hitler's Mein Kampf with reference to groups of people (armies, German-Austrians) where they do not refer to extermination. They refer to such things as military defeat and slavization. He also used 'vernichtung' in reference to abolishing political parties. Hence, 17th century usage does not seem to be decisive or particularly relevant.

It is true that one way of rooting out/uprooting/eradicating or nullifying/annihilating a group would be to kill every member of it, but not the only way. It is language in which a threat or warning of ambiguous scope is issued. I agree that 'umbringen' is unambiguous.

The genuineness of the speech and recording in whole or part has been debated. One such discussion is in Butz's Hoax of the 20th Century. Vincent Reynouard has devoted a video to it. The overall revisionist response is to accept that it is or may well be genuine and try to minimize the significance. Baldur von Schirach remembers having been present at such a speech in his memoirs.

[Hektor]

CercaTrova

How will you interpret this words from the speech :

"Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. "~

Can't speak for CercaTrova of course. But if I take the text at face value, I'd say it speaks about battle experience, where it isn't uncommon that such figures of corpses lie next to each other, especially when the corpses of the fallen are collected.

[Hegwood]

CercaTrova,

I read your post. I did not bother with the videos nor the responses of other forum members.

When I read the holocaust story, the physical description of how millions of jews were murdered and how their corpses were disposed of, I find it so unbelievable that even if the exterminationists were to find their "holy grail", evidence of a Hitler order to exterminate the Jews, my reaction would be "well why didn't his subordinates at least try to carry it out?".

For me the impossibility begins with the ridiculous story of Treblinka, particularly, the way in which the bodies of victims were simply piled up and burned. In a previous post, I have tried to explain how ridiculous this is from the point of view of anyone who takes any notice of how things happen in the real world. See the following thread.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9955&p=75329&hilit=Carcass#p75329

If anyone was murdered at Treblinka their skeletal remains are still there. Exhume them, count them, and give them a descent burial!

The same goes for Belzec, Sobibor, and the alleged einsatzgruppen killings.

Consider the " Jaeger Report". Allegedly it documents the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in villages, towns, and cities in Lithuania. They were buried in mass graves near the locations where they lived. If the graves exist it would not be difficult even today to locate and exhume them. Someone in each village, town, or city either remembers the event or was told about it by his elders. Lithuania is not a remote sparsely populated frontier. These towns are not remote locations. Find the graves exhume the bodies and give them descent burials.

You are already aware of the physical evidence that exposes the Auschwitz hoax and know it didn't happen.

I wish you and others luck in finding the documents and other scholarly evidence to expose this hoax but I doubt that the authenticity and meaning of such so called evidence as the Posen Speech will ever be answered to the satisfaction of all. Regardless, the holocaust still didn't happen.

Hegwood

[CercaTrova]

Thank you for all your responses. I will reply to your posts one by one so the thread won't get too confusing. Please forgive if that leads to my responses to earlier posts ommiting points made in later posts, I will try to simply answer chronologically.

CercaTrova

How will you interpret this words from the speech :

"Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. "

Yes, this part is quite ambiguous. What does he mean by "decent person"? My first impression of that segment was that he is emphasizing the fact that killing jews does not make the SS evil, because it was simply a necessary wartime measure. He continues with: "because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators." Next he says that almost all the SS men did not steal any of the Jewish money, maybe that is what he means by "remained decent". Definitely ambiguous.

[CercaTrova]

There's no doubt the Nazis used extremist language. But so did others:

Churchill had favoured a strategy of attacking the civilian population centres from the air some 20 years before Hitler ordered such raids.

Britain's war leader is quoted during the First World War as saying: "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population."

Yes, but he too did not leave it at extremist language. Churchill really did firebomb German cities to kill hundreds of thousands of women, children and civilians.

I think it is Irving who points out that genocide is the wrong term. Even if innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately murdered by the Nazis, it would be "innocenticide", not genocide. But if we talk about innocenticide, then reparations will not only have to go to Israel, but to almost every country, especially Japan and even - Germany. Hence the focus on the murder of the alleged 6 million innocent Jews, not the tens of million innocent civilians killed in gulags in the Soviet Union, for example.

In other words, I don't think it is terribly implausible that the NSDAP did kill civilians - everyone did at the time. Maybe the real question is not did the holocaust happen, but rather, was it blown out of proportion and exaggerated to absurd level in (1) its scope, (2) its cruelty and (3) it's uniqueness. This is mere speculation of course.

[borjastick]

If the Posen speech is true and the recording accurate it can quite easily be defined as a rousing, motivational talk aimed at the troops who would be going into battle to do good work. Work that would require strength and backbone. Every commander worth his salt today, on the eve of battle gives his troops a 'us against evil, good verses bad' speech.

This is the eve-of-battle speech made by Colonel Tim Collins to the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq in 2003.

"We go to liberate, not to conquer.

We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own.

Show respect for them.

There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly.

Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send.

As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.

Wipe them out if that is what they choose.

But if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.

Iraq is steeped in history.

It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.

Tread lightly there.

You will see things that no man could pay to see

- and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.

You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing.

Don't treat them as refugees for they are in their own country.

Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.

If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day.

Allow them dignity in death.

Bury them properly and mark their graves.

It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive.

But there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign.

We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back.

There will be no time for sorrow.

The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction.

There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam.

He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done.

As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.

It is a big step to take another human life.

It is not to be done lightly.

I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts.

I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.

If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family.

The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.

If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer.

You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest - for your deeds will follow you down through history.

We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.

It is not a question of if, it's a question of when.

We know he has already devolved the decision to lower commanders, and that means he has already taken the decision himself.

If we survive the first strike we will survive the attack.

As for ourselves, let's bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.

Our business now is North.

On the issue of open discussion of brutal murder on a massive scale of innocent civilians to further the war effort one need look no further than the little shit that was Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, head of the Royal Air Force in the second world war.

This is one of his quotes:

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." -- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Commander, British Royal Air Force, October 25, 1943 quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 220.

[CercaTrova]

No human remains to back up the unfounded claims. Not a single enormous mass grave as alleged has ever been excavated, contents verified and shown. Not one. The storyline says 6M Jews & 5M others = 11M, now just think about that.

Sure - but even revisionists admit to hundreds of thousands that died. Surely you are not saying there are no human remains anywhere, or that nobody died at all? I guess the point I'm making is the figure might be much more questionable than the killings themselves.

In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of 'ausrottung' would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots.

Can you link a source for that? It just does not match up with my etymological research.

Then we have some True Believers citing much later dictionaries claiming ausrotten as meaning 'extermination' (uprooting is it's real meaning) ... published in accordance with the propaganda about WWII.

The propagandists who spread the commonly accepted narrative about the holocaust were not terribly thorough in eliminating traces of their deceptions. I doubt they went so far as to change all dictionaries. It is certainly possible, but it seems unlikely.

National Socialist legislation has now introduced corrective measures against this over-alienization. I say corrective, because the proof that the Jews are not being ruthlessly rooted out [AUSGEROTTET] is that in Prussia alone 33,500 Jews are working in manufacturing and industry, and 89, 800 are engaged in trade and commerce; and that with only 1 per cent of the population Jewish, 17.5 per cent of our attorneys and in Berlin nearly half the registered doctors are still Jewish.

Ofcourse at this time (1935), the charge against the Nazis was not that they were ruthlessly exterminating the Jews.

That is interesting. But we're still talking about "ausrotten" - what about all the other words that were being used associated with killing and extinction? Namely: Umbringen, ausschalten, Vernichtung.

- The 1936 anti-German book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled DER GELBE FLECK: DIE AUSROTTUNG VON 500,000 DEUTSCHEN JUDEN.
I guess the absurd 'exterminations' started in 1936 then.

As you said, this is an anti German book. It actually seems to show that the propaganda about German extermination plans did start long before 1940.

Hitler in his Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1933:

den Marxismus und seine Begleiterscheinungen aus Deutschland AUSZUROTTEN" - "to eradicate Marxism and its accompanying phenomena from Germany.
How does one explain "from Germany", "out of Germany" if the "auszurotten" only possible meaning was the physical extermination of living beings? Was Hitler thinking of gassing "Marxism" itself? If so, no gassings of German Marxists has been alleged before the war.

No, as a native speaker I can assure you that "Marxismus ausrotten" means to eradicate Marxism, i.e. to get rid of the set of ideas and the ideology, it is not related to killings. If the wording was, however, "Marxisten ausrotten", that would indeed imply that German marxists would be killed - at least in the context of present-day German language.

It should also be pointed out that if Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews was a secret plan that required the destruction of evidence at the end of the war, then why did he use the word ausrotten in so many of his public speeches prior to the war?'

That's a very good point. Maybe they started getting rid of evidence only once they saw that the were actually going to lose the war and international tribunals became likely?

Either way, the meaning of 'ausrotten' actually plays against the holocaust theory. If it did mean murder and the plan was public, then that means the Germans did not attempt to carry out a secret plan and did not attempt to destroy the evidence afterwards to conceal the plan. Clearly this has major implications reaching far beyond the meaning of one of Himmler's "secret" speeches. If the meaning of the word is figurative, then Himmler's speech is not proof of anything.

Yes. It definitely seems Hitler envisioned a Europe without any Jews or Jewish influence. Again, the question remains why in 1939 he started speaking of "Vernichtung", and why Himmler said "umbringen".

This alleged (recorded) speech, as German judge Staeglich has adroitly pointed out, is a hodgepodge of non-sequitors, nonsense, and re-worked text, see:
'Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence
By Wilhelm Stäglich'
http://codoh.com/library/document/230

I just followed that link. There's a speech from October 6th, 1943 in that document as well. It seems authentic to me, but it could be a forgery for the sake of psychological warfare of course, much like many other details of the holocaust. I'm not sure how we could find out for sure.

- To have a speech with such alleged secret content recorded? Right. SS General Berger did not recognize Himmler’s voice listening to the tape.

I tried to find other speeches by Himmler to better compare the voice, but could not find much on youtube.

http://codoh.com/library/document/891/

[/quote]

It's unfortunate that this is only an English translation and not the original text. I was also unable to find more than 6 minutes of the speech from April 4th.

[CercaTrova]

'Hitler's Public [alleged] Holo-words & Dishonest Historians'
viewtopic.php?t=9038

I don't see that the blue texts completely reframe the red texts as innocent. It seems to me these other speeches give all the more credence to the idea that Hitler saw in the Jews a mortal enemy that would destroy the white race if it was not destroyed first. Every nation killed millions of enemy civilians during world war 2. Why would Germany be the exception and spare all Jews, especially considering how dangerous the NSDAP believed them to be?

Hitler was not a scared sheep terrorized by the ADL with 'anti-Semite' name-callings. When Hitler said 'anti-Semitism', he was not talking about [alleged] hateful feelings toward Jews like today. When he said 'anti-Semitism', he was talking about opposing Jewry's power through anti-Jewish laws and propaganda/education. Hitler's understanding of the word 'anti-Semitism' was closer to Wilhelm Marr's one than to ours. In Hitler's views, Jewry's power was to be annihilated in every country dragged into the war because he believed such countries would have finally enacted laws and spread propaganda both making the Jewish grip over media, politics and economics impossible.

If that was the case, then not even deportation would have been necessary. I have my doubts.

Let's assume Hitler successfully deported all Jews to Madagascar. He then creates a great German Reich with anti Jewish laws and without any Jewish population. So far so good. Except the Jews start to leave Madagascar and immigrate into other countries, where they start getting involved in banking, media, education and politics. They start to spread anti German sentiments in those countries, instigate a war against the Third Reich and again the German people have no peace. In other words, Hitler must have realized that a mere deportation would not be a permanent solution to the Jewish question. UNLESS he was of the opinion that world wide anti-Jewish laws and propaganda would have been enough to prevent them from seizing power again - but in that case, why deport them from Germany? Wouldn't it be better to keep them in Germany where they can be more easily controlled with these laws?

When we take into consideration just how dangerous Hitler considered the Jews to be, I think an extermination plan is not entirely implausible.

I also think it is possible that Himmler was significantly more hardcore than Hitler himself. Is it thinkable that Hitler abdicated the solution of the Jewish question to Himmler entirely? And that Himmler was much more of a hard liner. It seems Himmler was also much more into the esoteric stuff like ariosophy and the Thule society, whereas Hitler was more practical and even denounced airosophy AFAIK. His stance seems to have been - "Jews are a danger to our society - we need to get rid of them". That does not necessarily mean killing them all, but maybe Himmler was simply more radical than Hitler? The Madagascar plan was Hitler's idea, after all.

I'm not very clear on these questions, but maybe it is some food for thought.

[CercaTrova]

The terms 'ausrotten' and 'vernichtung' are both used repeatedly in Hitler's Mein Kampf with reference to groups of people (armies, German-Austrians) where they do not refer to extermination. They refer to such things as military defeat and slavization. He also used 'vernichtung' in reference to abolishing political parties. Hence, 17th century usage does not seem to be decisive or particularly relevant.

If an army is annihilated or exterminated, I think it is pretty safe to assume that every soldier is dead.

It is true that one way of rooting out/uprooting/eradicating or nullifying/annihilating a group would be to kill every member of it, but not the only way. It is language in which a threat or warning of ambiguous scope is issued. I agree that 'umbringen' is unambiguous.

Yes. Why has the word "umbringen" not been addressed? We can basically only draw two conclusions. Either Himmler's speech was fake, or he did want to kill the Jews - not just deport them.

[CercaTrova]

CercaTrova

How will you interpret this words from the speech :

"Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. "~

Can't speak for CercaTrova of course. But if I take the text at face value, I'd say it speaks about battle experience, where it isn't uncommon that such figures of corpses lie next to each other, especially when the corpses of the fallen are collected.

Yes, I agree that is a plausible interpretation of the numbers of bodies.